I just purchased a TX16W in what I thought was pretty good condition, but when I turn it on, it says "LOADING SYSTEM!! please wait" and below that line, "insert disk" and it freezes. I've the Typhoon 2000 OS on a floppy to update it, but no matter what disk I put in the floppy drive, it stays on that same screen. The LED next to the floppy drive flickers if a disk is in it, like its trying to do something, but to no avail.

Any help from the samplers gurus would be much appreciated, because I have no clue what to do here.

It's one of three things:1. The floppy drive is dead. This can be replaced easily enough. I replaced mine with the drive from a Commodore Amiga.2. You haven't correctly copied the Typhoon OS onto the floppy. Read the instructions carefully.3.The floppy disc is faulty- try another one. This is not a reliable medium. Make sure it's DD, not HD.

This is a great sampler, nice sound and probably the best user interface ever with Typhoon.

It was both the floppy disk size, and the drive itself causing the problem. I found a few 720Kb disks around the house, and loaded Typhoon onto one of those. The first time putting it into the sampler, though, it still sat at the same screen. I had to forcefully shove the disk in to get the drive to grab it and load the data. All is well now though, I've got Typhoon 2000 and I'm ready to rock!

That's exactly the problem I had with the drive in mine until I replaced it. I've an article here, which has a link to the sample library- pretty much everything Yamaha released for it. Contains some tips also:http://www.madtheory.com/TX16W.html

Last edited by madtheory on Sat May 02, 2009 8:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

Diao wrote:Are there any cool little tips or tricks you have for this bad boy?

I haven't used my TX16W for a while, so I'm a little rusty. With that said though, you can get really interesting granular-type sounds using Typhoon's time stretching. Using that, I was able to turn a kick drum sample into a fairly convincing Rhodes.

Also, take advantage of Typhoon's midi control of menu functions. With that I was able to turn my drum pads into up, down, left, right, and enter and, most helpful of all, I used a fader for quick scrolling.

I ended up finding bugs in the OS when using an LFO and a few other nit-picky things which put me off of the sampler, but there's definitely a lot of flexibility in the Typhoon OS.

what's the going rate for one of these now? ie. what should i offer an ebayer who has unsuccessfully tried to auction it at a rather high starting bid?

after weeks of research into purchasing my first hardware sampler, the tx16w seems like a very interesting prospect once coupled with the typhoon os. something about these weird late 80s/early 90s yamaha instruments that really appeals to me

also, are there any reliability issues i need to take into account? changing a broken disk drive won't be an issue, is there anything else that goes wrong with these things? i get the impression yamaha stuff is built to last...

It's actually a very good sampler. I would say between €50 to €100 depending on the amount of memory and the brightness of the display, and condition of disk drive. As you know drive is easy to fix. I assume the display is an EL foil, these can be purchased and fitted easily also. More than the base 1.5 Meg memory is rare, and IMO worth paying for, so maybe €150 to €200 for a 6 Meg. Bear in mind that an ESI32 with all the trimmings would go for something like €200, and it's a much better sampler. But the TX has very nice transposing and does that crunchy low sample rate aliasing effect much better than the ESI.